I recently had the opportunity to attend a presentation by Lee Aase, the social media guru at the Mayo Clinic. Lee obviously loves what he does, as he also operates what he calls the Social Media University, Global or SMUG. If you “attend” his university, you become a SMUGgle.

The Mayo Clinic makes extensive use of short videos and podcasts in which doctors discuss medical issues, sometimes very common and sometimes rather obscure. But because of the Mayo Clinic’s strong reputation and extensive reach, these videos and podcasts draw an impressive audience.

Nonetheless, there is one Mayo Clinic-related video that has far surpassed all others in popularity. In fact it’s not even close, as this video has now had in the neighborhood of 800,000 views. Is it about cancer? No. Is it about heart disease? No. Is it about sexually transmitted disease? No. It is an amateur - very amateur - YouTube video that shows an elderly couple playing the piano in the Mayo Clinic lobby. It is as funny and heartwarming as it is technically unpolished. Check it out:

What’s particularly interesting about this is that despite the fact that the quality of this video is poor at best and the subject matter is, well, trivial, this is the one that people want to watch. And, it’s a video that the Mayor Clinic PR staff never planned or saw coming. They didn’t even shoot this video; it was taken by someone in the lobby who then uploaded it to YouTube.

It immediately became what we call “viral,” meaning the word got out. Internet users passed the link along from person to person until it practically became a phenomenon.

Those of us who produce online videos all hope our products become viral, but it seldom happens. Despite our best planning and best efforts, it is often just a matter of chance that a video will “take off.” That can be both good and bad. Domino’s Pizza, for example, recently faced a huge public relations disaster when two of its employees videotaped themselves doing nasty things to a customer’s pizza in the kitchen before serving it. That video, too, ended up on YouTube.

At weac.org, we have been producing online videos for over a year now. Some have become quite popular, but none have come close to the heights reached by the 1 minute and 14 second video of the “charming couple” playing the piano in the Mayo Clinic lobby. We could always try to fit a piano in the lobby of our building, but I doubt that would do the trick.

Maybe you have a short education-related or union-related video you would like to share. If so, please contact me at hurleyb@weac.org, and we’ll see what we can do to at least get it out to WEAC members throughout the state. And who knows, it just might go viral.

In the meantime, you might want to check out some of our current weac.org videos. And remember, we are always looking for your input, feedback and ideas.